Thursday, November 24, 2016

In the November 9, 2016, “President-Elect Trump” issue of
TIME Magazine, Princeton Professor Eddie S. Glaude, Jr. predicts that most
pundits and scholars “will talk about the discontent of working-class white
Americans, how elites dismissed them with scorn and treated them with
condescension, and how they, in the end, rejected the status quo and the economic
philosophy that has left them behind.”

And, indeed, most of TIME’s elite “insider” pundits, whether
part of the Democratic or Republican establishment, in licking their wounds
over their erroneous predictions, explore both the economic and cultural split
between whites.Zeke Miller writes of
those who don’t “feel like you’ve had a 2.5% GDP growth this quarter.”
Charlotte Alter claims, “Trump’s victory was fueled by a supersurge of white
voters from rural areas, motivated by economic anxiety with strong undertones
of racial resentment” as well as “the stench of sexism.” David Von Drehle
alliteratively calls it, “the rust belt’s revenge.” But on who? On blacks, and
other people of colors? On white elites? Or both?

J.D. Vance, in “What we can learn about---and do for---the
white working class,” states that the phenomenon of “The white working class”
in this election (the sequel to the “colorblind” post/racial media echo chamber
show of 08/09) is “a consequence of this incredible geographic and cultural segregation
we have in this country.” Vance appeals to the “elite” he assumes that the
primary readership of TIME magazine is more likely to identify with than the
working class. “We can’t have an elite culture isolated from the rest of the
country. It’s not a durable way to have a well-functioning society.” Since we
underestimate this segregation (between whites) at our peril, he calls for a
“cultural reconciliation…that can’t just happen in one direction.”

The only specific suggestion he offers is that “our country
would really benefit if those who went to elite universities, who started
businesses, who started nonprofits weren’t just doing so on the coasts.”
Vance’s suggestion may work for some, especially given the stratospheric rent
increases that is forcing many out of these “coastal elite” cities (I know
quite a few blacks feeling forced to repatriate the same south their
grandparents left only to find different forms of racism here in Oakland, and I
know many whites---mostly of the creative class—who are also being driven out
of the cities, but would these folks find open arms in what Vance calls these
“white working class” areas, or would they justifiably be called carpetbaggers,
colonizers?)

I believe that if we are genuinely interested in overcoming
“this incredible geographic and cultural segregation we have in this country,”
we first need to do away with the reductive distinction between “elite” college
educated (as if that’s “blue”) and non-college educated “white working class”
(as if that’s red), which still clings to anachronistic equation of “blue
collar” to “working class” to further fragment worker solidarity in this “consumer
era.’

Beyond that, I agree that it’s largely true that corporate
mass media, as well as its social media spinoff, has done little to nothing to
create channels that could reach across this cultural divide (between north and
south, city and rural, for instance) and has, in fact, created walls. This has
been the function, and achievement, of Mass Culture America for almost 50 years.
Often, this is most profoundly played out in the ostensibly apolitical areas of
culture. Since so much of our cultural (mis)understandings are mediated by mass
culture, I think back to a time when American culture was more regional than
national, when different regions could use the national media to dialogue with
each other.

Today, we have football, and some local character is
maintained (“They like to boo in Philly”), but think of today’s national music,
which is mostly centralized in Hollywood. Before 1970, in the 1950s and 60s
(which may be the era some Trump followers would call “great”), we see an
America in which Chicago had a series of overlapping scenes connected to
locally owned radio stations and record labels to brand a “Chicago sound,” and
the same was true for Detroit, Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, Philly, etc.
Today, as has been largely the case since the 70s (with a few brief
challenges), LA has swallowed up the nation’s music culture, with the possible exception
of Nashville, or Atlanta (and kinda sorta Austin).

This network of regional cultures didn’t totally bridge the
geographic and cultural segregation, but it at least put them in dialogue with
each other. Music at its best is a uniting force that relishes cultural differences,
but today’s LA based music industry prefers we forget this (as do the Silicon
Valley folks invading my town with their Pandora algorithms). Furthermore, it’s
no accident that most local economies (both in big cities and smaller towns)
did much better when the music industry was less centralized in L.A.

Yet Vance, like the vast majority of pundits in TIME, fails
to take non-white America into account, and thus ignores the more complex
triangular relationship. For if we’re going to talk about the necessity of
healing the rift between the “blue” whites and the “red” whites (as more
important than, say, the rift between the “red” working class whites and “blue”
working class blacks, or between the “blue” whites and the “blue” blacks), it’s
hopefully with the understanding that this is not to unify a divided white
culture at the expense of people of color (as has been done far too often,
going back to Bacon’s rebellion in the 17th century).

So, in order for this reconciliation to occur, we cannot simply
have a two-way reconciliation between the white working class and the white coastal
elites, but also with blacks and other communities of color. In contrast to
Vance, Eddie S. Glaude believes the deeper meaning of the election results is
that “White America—and I mean those who see themselves as white people, not as
those who happen to be white—has struck back.” While the first argument claims
a class conflict within “the white community” was more responsible for
Trump/Pence than race and race-ism, Glaude emphasizes stats that show that 45%
of college educated white women and 54% of college educated men preferred Trump
to show that these other “insider” scholars and pundits in TIME and elsewhere
are overemphasizing the split between college educated and non college-educated
whites, in order for the white “elites” to “other” the white working class (to
say nothing of non-whites).

In other words, the non-college educated white “rust belt”
(or rural) working class men and women do not have a corner on racism, and many
of the white ‘elites” (whether Democratic or Republican) in the pundit class
that claim so, are doing so in order to hide their own racism: “The ugliness of
so many white elites can’t be hidden behind the veil of so-called white working
class resentment. Black people know that business owners and politicians donned
white sheets and sat on White Citizen Councils. The election of Donald Trump is
just the latest instance of this collective sickness.”

Racism, first and foremost, is a policy pushed down by the economic
elites. While Joel Klein warns Trump (and his voters) that the future must be
“multi-ethnic and globalized,” Glaude knows that the future must be
multi-cultural, but that doesn’t mean it has to be globalized. “We announce the
bankruptcy of an economic philosophy that has decimated workers, no matter the
color of their skin.” Glaude suggests that the non-elite whites, and the
non-elite blacks may have more in common and points to an anti-racist future.
He holds out an olive branch to the white working class, who may or may not be
blinded by racial hatred. In a sense,
he’s doing more to reach out to, and understand the “white working class” more
than any of the elites in TIME are.

++++

The rift between white “elites” and white “working class,”
but also between whites and non-whites that may have played a greater role in
this election, may be understood better if we consider, for instance, the
relationship between the 3 popular music genres that have largely come to
dominate America’s musical landscape for 70 years now (post WW2): “Pop,”
R&B, and C&W.

In the 1940s, northern media networks and record label
conglomerates (say RCA/NBC) created a sense of American popular music that
excluded the vast majority of “race” records in Jim Crow America. It also
excluded much southern C&W. Both R&B and C&W made a virtue out of
necessity, and developed their own networks. C&W had a rebel separatist
pride that goes back to, say, 1861. R&B and its networks helped create a
mid-20th century black middle class.

This happened in an a “pre-corporate era,” when some New
Deal regulations remained intact, and the corporate media conglomerates had
foolishly abandoned radio for the seemingly more lucrative TV. In retrospect,
some, like Nelson George, have argued that this era of a more segregated music
culture—between R&B and C&W, and between R&B (and gospel) and pop
allowed not only more cultural self-determination, but also enabled more money
to flow into the black community than the subsequent (ostensibly less violent)
assimilationist regime, and certainly folks like Merle Haggard, who made
millions without ever really crossing over into white pop, witnessed analogous
trends happening in the “white working class.”

And though these two genres, and the cultures (or “races”)
they implied did certainly not work in tandem (for instance whites would
terrorize black radio stations, especially once they found their kids were
listening to them), it’s interesting to note that they shared a common enemy.
Most of the anger or defiant pride in C&W lyrics (from Loretta Lynn to
2004’s “Redneck Woman”) was/is not directed against black folks, but rather the
northern hypocritical white who thinks he’s less racist, the white that
applauds Martin Luther King when he’s fighting against “Bull” Connor and
Gov’ner Wallace, but that turns on him after his Chicago Campaign targeting
northern racism (while smug former Rick James sideman Neil Young pontificates).

Yep,I ‘get that strain of white resentment. The
white elite corporate pop industry, which often tended to be a tepid
compromise, and had a watered down lowest common denominator sense of
“America,” tried to seduce both southern C&W, and southern R&B to the
glorious elevation of “crossover,” but even many white youth found this
“talented tenth” of black artists plucked for the white pop culture by elitist
assimilationist “Svengalis” like Ed Sullivan or Dick Clark not nearly as
engaging as the R&B that was only played on the black stations (like, say, James Brown Live At The Apollo), as well
as the C&W that hadn’t crossed over from the country stations (“’and up
north ain’t no-one who buys them,’ and I said, ‘but I will.’”)—and this state
of affairs was threatening to the elites.

They had to lure these whites, as well as these blacks, to
their idea of national pop culture. RCA’s “Elvis” did some of this work. The
“British Invasion” did too, yet when the Pop Industry elites declared the end
of a separate R&B (“Race”) playlist in 1964 (as Malcolm X was popularizing
the word separatism), there was a tremendous push-back against a move many in
the burgeoning black music industry saw as a sign of forced assimilation—so
soon they had to reinstitute a separate R&B chart and devise more insidious
ways to undercut black self-determination.

From the perspective of rhythm & blues, the invention of
FM/Album-Oriented, “counter culture” Arena rock was even more successful in
helping effect a kind “backlash” (or “white-wash”) or “white flight” from the
AM/Top 40 multi-racial communities. From the perspective of country &
western, this FM/Album-Oriented cultural revolution paralleled the invasion of
the suburbs and exurbs onto what had once been rural America. Pop artists
started “going country,” but more profoundly they were “going LA” (The Eagles,
for instance), or going suburban.

In the 70s, two trends that may seem to be opposite
occurred. First, radio was, as James Brown put it, re-segregating—not just
between blacks and whites, but by genres. Soft Rock/Southern Rock/Heavy Metal;
Quiet Storm V. Funk. Second, R&B and C&W became more like “pop.” There
seemed less variety as the music industry centralized in the coastal elite city
of LA. By the end of the decade, funk became whitewashed into disco (Frankie
Crocker added Queen to the playlist of the nation’s premier black radio
station), and country became countrypolitan (Kenny Rogers’ #1 hit by Lionel
Ritchie, for instance). Newer technology and increased corporate control had
allowed the elites to declare victory over the small town (or even bigger city)
C&W and R&B stations where the DJS had some autonomy and could break
local talent like back in the days of Johnny Cash and Rufus Thomas.

Both C&W, and R&B suffered from this, and, in
retrospect, one might ask, just how great America could have been if these two genres could have (strategically)
united against the northern, and Hollywood, culture elites (the closest they
got was that both the black and white churches criticized The Beatles “Bigger
than God” stunt).

Soon, these elites could go further and take music off of AM
radio, and replace it with Rush Limbaugh and the like. As a music lover, this
would signify an anti-populist trend even if Rush Limbaugh had been as
“left-leaning” as, say, Amy Goodman. Why? Because too much talk, and not enough
music, divides!

Donald Trump certainly knew music’s power to unite as well
as to divide, and it’s not really an “accident” that Trump’s soundtrack is
largely that of the northern (& LA) corporate assimilationist backlash to
(and baby boomer white flight from) the threatened de-segregation, or musical
“miscegenation” of the 60s between black and white (and created a culture war
between rock and roll and country). His largely 70s/80s white rock soundtrack
included working class anthems like Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It,”
but was certainly not going to include a black working class anthem like 1982’s
“The Message” by Grandmaster Flash.

When considering Trump’s playlist, it might seem a little
odd that a man who promises to make America great again would emphasize the
songs by a band that was part of the phenomena known as the British Invasion,
The Rolling Stones, over, say, Merle Haggard or Motown songs. According to The
Washington Post:

Before he's taken the stage at his events, and as he's
worked the crowd afterward, those who come to hear him speak are reminded that
they "can’t always get what [they] want" via one of more than half a
dozen Rolling Stones songs in regular rotation, including the eyebrow-raising
“Brown Sugar” and "Let's Spend the Night Together," the pill-popping
anthem "Mother's Little Helper" and the patiently confident “Time Is
On My Side.” (“Now, you always say that you want to be free. But…you'll come
running back to me...”)” Some of his song choices “might come across as a
wink of sorts -- perhaps a self-aware mogul poking fun at his public
caricature. “Sympathy for the Devil” is a Trump trail standard: “Please
allow me to introduce myself. I'm a man of wealth and taste,” Mick Jagger
sings -- in Satan’s voice.”[1]

Indeed, Trump could “laugh at himself” in his Mick Jagger
clothes in the “eyebrow-raising” song where he identifies with the plantation
owner who rapes the slave women (and then calls them fat), while certainly not
making equal (or any) time for a black perspective as in, say, “Bid Em In,” by
Oscar Brown, Jr.[2]

Trump’s Stones playlist also features the first song that
really allowed the Stones’ to “invade” America’s top 40 in 1964. The song was a
cover of a follow-up to the first big crossover hit of American artist, Irma
Thomas (known as The Soul Queen of New Orleans); or might say “cover up.” The
Stones, with help of the northern and LA based national musical establishment,
were able to secure more play for their version than she did for hers, and
money drained out of America (both black and white, after all, there were quite
a few white people making money off of Irma Thomas) to the land of the
Anglo-Saxons.

For the Stones, the rest is rock and roll history (while
Irma Thomas got a job in a K-Mart or was it a Montgomery Ward?). This was not
an isolated incident in the music industry of this time, yet if Trump truly
wants to make America Great again, why not at least play the Irma Thomas original (made in USA) over the Stones?

It seems for Trump that part of the essence of this era when
America was great is that exhilarating feeling when Northern White elites, like
the teenage New York Donald Trump who first started wearing his hair all more
Beatle-esque, could be rescued by the British from the fearful onslaught of
southern R&B, and (I might add)southern C&W.Ah, 1964, when both C&W and R&B had
more self-determination (and some whites in power who didn’t like that were
plotting). Musically speaking, the north always had a hard time seducing the
south (whether black or white) to its playlists. And over the previous decade
these forms of music rooted in the south had been seducing white northerners
away (to say nothing of the northern migration of blacks changing northern
white culture despite itself).

Using Jagger, however, to erase original versions of both
R&B and C&W tunes (he certainly could rock more than, say, Pat Boone)
could seduce more into the arms of assimilation in the classic rock (70s and
80s) era Trump emphasizes--the generation that smoothed over—if not resolved--
the culture wars between the white north and white south (in ways hauntingly
similar to the unification of southern and northerna century earlier) with “southern rock” (and
don’t get me started on so-called “fusion”); the generation who even considered
disco (or “Funk in Bee Gees whitefoot”) too black (and/or too gay), and worthy
of burning, while some black youth, on the other hand, considered it too
“corporate white” and the punks had to agree, damning Disco with the same
finger they damned dinosaur-yacht rock); ---the generation that was raised on
Journey (and not offered much of a black rock and roll alternative by the
corporate radio).

Some of them also
loved C&W, or at least countrypolitan or so called Contemporary Country (which
often sounds more like 70s rock than it does like classic country), but some
scorned country as redneck music or perhaps their father’s music, and felt left
behind when rock and roll “lost the battle to hip hop.” But Rolling Stones,
once allegedly a threatening “counter culture” or “white youth drug culture”
band had now before easy-listening, a safe bet, a unifier of white culture.

I, too, still love many Stones songs, just not the few
overplayed hits Trump used (and even, perhaps, breathed new life into)….enough
black folks like it that it’s not as specifically white, yet the Stones,
perhaps more than any other band, could kind of effect a culture reconciliation
between southern and northern, or rural and and rust belt working class whites
which signified Trump’s coalition….and, for the younger folks, he’s got Adele.
But for a man who boldly claimed at his acceptance speech that “the forgotten
men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” he, like many
Americans, seems to have forgotten the American
musicians (both R&B, and C&W) who made America great (and made the
Rolling Stones possible). I’d argue that Trump’s campaign playlist featured
more of the kind of white classic rock pushed by the post-regional
Hollywood-based music industry than it did contemporary country and R&B for
the same reason he favors tax cuts to the richest Americans at the expense of
working class Americans of all races. If his choice of music is any reflection,
Trump will not be bringing back many jobs to rust belt, rural, much less
inner-city America.

Wednesday, November 2, 2016

“In protest movements, as in
wars, the people on the bottom don’t write history” (156)

I always felt that one of the reasons the Occupy Wall Street
99% movement (of 2011/12) was doomed to failure, aside from hostile external
forces like the police, the corporate media, and the ostensibly non-political
real estate market, was because there was a wall of misunderstanding between
those who set up the occupy camps (where everyone gets 5 minutes to speak at a
microphone), and those fighting more through the formal mediation of art,
writing, or recorded music. Both were needed for the movement’s success, but some
of the former, at their worst, declared that they were the true activists and
accused the latter of wanting to be “leaders” or “spokesmen”—or too individual
while the latter, often on the defensive, would respond by accusing the former
of making no room for the contemplative mode or the more inwardly-driven
introvert. It didn’t help matters that many of the whites whose voices tended
to dominate this “leaderless” movement were also not taking seriously the
concerns expressed of the black women who showed up at rallies with signs that
said “blacks have always been the 99%.”

By contrast, in my experience, I’ve found that the most
vital, engaging, even potentially revolutionary, grassroots social arts and
political scenes and movements are able to form bridges across specialized
professions or segregated communities. For instance, the underground scenes
that provided me shelter and community in Philadelphia (in the 80s) and to a
lesser extent in Oakland (during the 00s), at their best, found the creative
spark that fueled them by crossing lines between “town” and “gown” (the streets
and college), between “doers” and “thinkers,” or a more ‘blue collar’ (punk and
hip hop) and white collar ethos, and not merely on a fashion level; they even
helped bridge the gap (if not smash the wall) between whites and blacks
(graffiti was an especially important bridge in the 80s). Sure, there were
limits to this “unity in diversity approach” (since many of these scenes were
youth scenes, they still struggled with ageism, even if it was a defensive
ageism), but there was a recognition that the thinker and doer, the artist and
the activist, need each other if there’s any hope that the alternative economy and culture we were creating was
to be sustainable, something more
than another transient flash in the plan, and generally, in my experience, the
women in these scenes understood this—and served as voices, and forces, of
unity—more than the men.

Ex-Black Panther, and “lone wolf,” Judy Juanita’s new De FactoFeminism: Essays Straight Outta Oakland (2016) sheds many insights
into these dynamics in ways that can be useful for any future artists and
activists who wish to work together to form a movement that may topple the
patriarchal, plutocratic, racist imperialism that dominates American reality in
an era of global capitalism. She understands the psychology in which “activists,
oft called anarchistic, despise artists who don’t overtly join them.” (108)
Some feel it’s an unequal trade, that somehow the artists aren’t giving back
what they’re receiving. In any event, I’ve heard many activists scold the very
people they’re trying to recruit, or seduce, “you’re acting too much like an
individualist, a bourgeois
individualist.” But it’s one thing for a white (often male) ideological
anti-individualist to scold another white male for being an individualist, but
given life in a country where whites (especially men) have been afforded the
full-rights of individualism compared to black men and women, it’s quite
another for an ideological anti-individualist to criticize a black woman,
especially when it may be as an individual that a woman is able to create
alliances across factions.

In De Facto Feminism,
Judy Juanita celebrates the working class
black individualist…by showing the (oft-unheralded) ways they help build
community, not through theoretical imperative, but simply in order to survive.
The women Juanita celebrates transcend the false “binary thinking dilemmas” (between
artist and activist, and between individualist and collectivist) to engage in
an artistic activism, and an altruism that need not be self-abnegating that
occupies a fertile, proliferative, place where selfishness and altruism,
individualism and community activism can unite. For sometimes the reason why
one doesn’t “fit in” to one social scene is the same reason you can get along
with more people from other social
scenes.

For Juanita, this has
been a life-long struggle, “an act of self-creation spanning 4 decades,” and De Facto Feminism is a record of her
findings that can be useful for current and future generations of artists and
activists in their struggles.

During her time with the Black Panthers, which in hindsight
she calls her phase of “naively determined black womanhood,” Juanita had been
an idealistic anti-individualist collectivist (In “Black Womanhood,” an essay
Juanita wrote at the age of 20 for the Black
Panther Newspaper, she writes that the struggle requires “her strength, not
her will, her leadership, her domination, but her strength”). But, it must not
be forgotten that Juanita, even as a young woman, was not just a Black Panther,
but also part of the Black Arts Movement (BAM which may not be as well known to
the general reader)[1]:

“As student activists at SF State, the Black Student Union
fought to bring Jones (Baraka), Lee (Mudhubuti) and Sanchez onto Campus. We
formed the Black Arts and Culture Troupe and toured community centers
throughout the Bay Area with poetry, dance and agit-prop plays. We enacted
ideas we were hearing on soap-boxes about black power, black consciousness, and
black beauty. We staged mock conflagrations like ones that were taking place in
urban cities. We were empowering ourselves, our communities and getting
academic credit. A natural progression was community activism.” (110)

When she joined the Black Panthers, she was drawn to the
alliance between artists and activists, but witnessed, during an era of
“shattering community,” a growing split between the two groups: “to look at the
BAM and its relation to the BPP renders a vision of the poets and the
dramatists standing in counterpoint.” Ultimately, however, “the activists
upstaged the artist/intellectuals. I had immense sympathy for the second group,
but pitied them (pitied their women more. How much subservience would soothe a
wounded ego?)” (107)

Despite the chauvinism she found in the BAM more than in the
BPP, and the factionalism and her torn allegiances, Juanita appreciated what
the BPP and Black Arts Movement had in common, and celebrates this legacy:

“The BPP was appropriating the oppressors’ language, and
using it to shatter oppression. That new use of language, in the BPP and the
BAM, was as powerful as any gun, and even more powerful because it aroused
feeling and changed the terms of discourse between friends, enemies, lovers, generations
and cultures. Being an agent of change meant I aroused deep feelings, affected
discourse, found the powerful voices that I had heard in childhood, in church,
in soul music, in the pulpit—in my own voice.” (111)

Juanita’s allegiance was both to art and to activism, and
she didn’t want to be forced to choose, and as we see her mind go back and
forth between the BPP and the BAM, weighing the advantages of each and trying
to develop a new synthesis, we see her

ability to step back from the heated conflicts and tense
divisiveness between the artists and activists to see the productive symbiosis:
“Black music, musicians and dancers became ambassadors at large to the
world“But the airwaves and new media[2]
amplified the beat, the dances, the Soul Train lines, the frizzy hair, the
handshakes, the lingo (bro), now of which needed the Gun or its bullet because
the BPP handled that task,” (113) and part of the reason the BPP was able to
handle the task is because of what women like Judy Juanita (a.k.a. Judy Hart)
provided.

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of both the
BAM and the BPP, the role of women in the Black Panther party (which was
numerically mostly women) is still not emphasized enough in biopics like the
recent PBS Vanguard of The Revolution,
(2016), yet even in Seize The Time
(1970), Bobby Seale wrote of the first women in the Black Panther’s power
to educate and recruit new members to the party. Juanita, ex-editor-in-chief of
the Black Panther newspaper, gives
her own account of the importance of these young women as bringing together
rival factions to create and sustain a larger, more rooted, movement.
Certainly, Juanita and the other women were no passive recipients of edicts
from Bobby, Huey, and Eldridge:

“Our gang of five affected policy and high-level decisions
by virtue of our intense participation, outspokenness….we also formed liaisons
and romantic relationships with brothers in the party. From the upper echelon
to the lumpen proletariat, we lived, slept, ate and cooked with the BPP…. We
were the initial link between the campus and the party. Three of us married ‘brothers
in the struggle’ who also happened to be educated brothers. This is significant
because our connections and intimacy (which some labeled promiscuity) connected
brothers from the party with brothers from SF State. The BSU brothers like to
talk about supplying the BPP with guns and money, but this bridge called my
back supplied the people’s army with equal and greater provision.” (40)

This final point provides a great example of what the mature
Juanita refers to as “De Facto Feminism.” In her title essay, she offers her
own definition of “de facto feminism” by contrasting it with the 20th
century feminism she experienced:

20th Century feminism is “defensive, lean-in
elite, scarce, historical, white-ish, precious, theoretical, lawful, contempt
for men but not their $$$.” De-facto feminism is “offensive, classless,
proliferative, a historical, black and then some, inside/outside the law, do
you with/without men” (146). This contrast does not get tangled up in the
academic debates between the “difference” and “sameness” feminists, but is a
celebration of the practical de facto
feminists who “stand between peace and war everyday in…the Gaza Strips of
the US” in the absence of being able to change the laws.

Although she claims de facto feminism is “classless,” it’s
clear that it’s working class as Juanita never loses sight of the economic
dimensions to patriarchal sexism, especially when coupled with “the stigma that
black people carry as pigment” that “forces them to be what others would term
illegal, immoral but not impractical.” (151):

A whole class of workers constitutes women who braid hair,
part of the underground economy in the black community. Overwhelmingly black
and youthful, they work from home, a cadre of postmodern kitchen beauticians
who make a way out of no way, to raise children, make money, be stylish and create community.” (150—emphasis added).

Her accounts of these various and varied women remind me of
other women I’ve met in Oakland. When I read about “Shelly,” (152) I think of
the amazing Phavia Kujichagulia (“She also had a disinclination to sell her body
for a recording contract”). And when I read: “In New Jersey, I lived in a
six-unit building with several foxy single mothers who attracted and “housed”
members of the New York Giants football team during the season,” I am reminded
of another book by an Oakland author released this year, ElTyna McCree’s Oh What A Ride!

Although, like Juanita, McCree was born in 1946, and ElTyna
can certainly relate when Juanita writes “hands-on celibacy became my unspoken
choice for years,” their two stories are very different. Eltyna grew up near
Pittsburgh, PA, working for Allegheny Airlines while Juanita was editing The Black Panther.” A devout
church-goer, McCree worked closely as Director of Convention Services, and was
the official travel coordinator for the Church Of God In Christ COGIC, booking
reservations for conferences and becoming ordained as a preacher. Fleeing from
a destructive marriage back east, she (with the help of God) reinvents herself
in Oakland running the Connections Unlimited travel agency for over 30
years—and running for School Board as a republican in a democratic city—all
without a college degree--before gentrification cost her her shop. Reading
Juanita’s book, I think of Eltyna’s quite different (but in some ways similar,
minus the sex) services she provided for the Miami Dophins when they came to
Oakland for the Super bowl:

“The one and only
superbowl was being played at Stanford. The SF 49ers and the Miami Dolphins. We
had our new hotel in Oakland, which was hosting the Dolphins. We were beyond
excited. In those days I was so dressed up every day. I decided to walk up to
the Hyatt just to check on everything. I arrived at the concierge desk. There
were about 30 folk there all needing something. She was overwhelmed, I told her
to take a break. I sat down. Well, that was Friday morning. I didn’t walk out
of the Hyatt til Monday at 1 p.m. Some of the Dolphin players wanted their game
tickets sold. The women needed babysitters, needed to have their hair and nails
done. They wanted to do to San Francisco for dinner. I knew where to get every
resource. Jim Cole’s sons and my goddaughter Ayoka (they went to Calif Prep
school together) helped with kids activities. Hair and nails got done. I rented
Lincoln Town Cars and we got coaches for their wives to dinner in San Fran and
Sausalito. Local folk were asking for transportation to the game. I chartered a
bus, got box lunches, and cases of champagne for the bus. I, Miss Fly, was
wearing 14 karat gold nails and players wanted to buy them for their wives, or
girlfriends. I got Ruby’s Gold Finger nails to come over to the hotel, an we
sold those…Dolphin general manager Mr. Callahan andI remained friends for
years. When I walked out of the hotel that day, I had profit of 4800.00 in
cash. Through her ups and downs, Eltyna too may also join the legions of women
Juanita celebrates as “walking talking political education classes who teach
persistence when things don’t work out?” Ain’t she a de-facto feminist?

Juanita’s essay can also remind me of my own Italian
grandmother who I know, alas, too little about, aside from her having to come
to America as a mail order bride and, when her husband died young, leaving her
with 8 children, used her social and business skills to, among other things,
run a numbers racket, even though she was illiterate and I could barely
understand her English. Juanita’s own great grand mother, an Okie from
Muskogee, took books and magazines from the homes of rich white folks where she
worked, and helped form that town’s first free colored library! (160)

All of the women Juanita celebrates in this essay, she
boldly claims, “are far more feminist than the broadcast/weathercasters who’ve
memorized feminist principles and theory from prep school through Ivy league.
Juanita also nods to the women who founded #BlackLivesMatters when she writes,
“a new wave of feminists instead might envision women of color setting policy
and leading, being arbiters instead of being left behind,” (153) and I think of
the #LaughingWhileBlack women scolded by a white woman on the Napa Valley Win
Train (2015), and their unheralded contributions to the legal corporate economy
when Juanita celebrates the book clubs that gave “mainstream publishing a shot
in the arm.”

Reminding us that “in protest movements, as in wars, the
people on the bottom don’t write history,” Juanita uses her literate skills throughout De Facto Feminism to speak of, to, and
for, those de facto closer to “the bottom,” and asks “will it take 200 years
for respect to come to those de facto feminists sitting on the bottom, squeezed
into pink collar ghettos and brown security guard uniforms lined up at the
minimum wage margins of this world?” (156)

Although Juanita expresses a justifiable disgust with “the
white-ish, lean-in elite” characteristics that is the legacy of dominant 20th
century (second-wave) feminism, her book does contain one instance that
celebrates the de facto (rather than de jure) feminism of the white women. During
her adolescence in 1964, during the period when Sly Stone wrote “The Swim,” and
helped create a dance craze working closely with white topless dancer Carol
Doda, Juanita writes of the powerful convergence that The Birth Control Pill
and Beatles created for whites. As a teenage Juanita watches young white women
starting to dance more with black women (even as their parents are leaving the
neighborhood), she notices:

“All the prepubescent and adolescent white girls having
orgasmic and orgiastic responses released a long suppressed sexuality from its
Victorian, Southern, and Puritan constraints. As these women let it rip in that
prolonged moment of free public expression, they freed up black women from
whoredom, from bearing the brunt and hard edge of the white men’s sexuality. We
were no longer the only culturally-sanctioned object of naughty or forbidden
sex, of plantation promiscuity.” (33-4)

This is one instance where young white women—by liberating
themselves—were able to do more to liberate black women than any of their
paternalistic Moynihan-Report inflected proclamations could….or would.
Juanita’s perspective on this time when de-segregation seemed promising through
music and dance should be must reading for any historian of the swinging
sixties sick of the Male Baby Boomer Rock Critic establishment’s version (Greil
Marcus, et al) and shows the ways in which the more ostensibly “apolitical”
music of the early 60s (the groundswell from the segregated R&B stations)
had more power than 70s “profound” light rock whose rise paralleled the rise of
white-ish feminism.

And, finally, she offers a powerful argument for why whites
should care, and not just for “altruistic” (paternalistic) reasons, but yes,
for selfish reasons. “Black people often serve as an early warning system for
the American populace…for better and worse, the hardcore issues blacks
face—guns, crime, poverty, failing schools—define the newest America.” (161).
As the standard of living for most whites in America has been noticeably
decreasing since the great crash of 2008 (although not as much as it is for
blacks), Juanita reminds me a little of those women at the Occupy Rally with
the “Blacks have always been the 99%” sign, as if to say “welcome to the club.”

+++++++++

I’m a woman. POW! Black. BAM!
Outspoken. STOMP! Don’t fit in. OUCH! The lesson? Sometimes when one takes a
stand one becomes a lone wolf, a neighborhood of one, a community of one to
declare sovereignty for art, sexuality, spirituality, and say-so, an
individual.” (7)[3]

De Facto Feminism,
however, includes a much more varied range of writing than my essayistic
explorations of two of its more publically-inflected threads may suggest to one
who hasn’t read it. Even if you have no interest in the Panthers, or community
activism, or in feminism, per se, there are many personally-inflected essays
that focus on her life as a writer. It is not merely a series of essayistic
arguments, but maintains “the feel of memoir” as these essays are arranged as a
loosely constructed chronology/autopbiographical journey. Eschewing the
fictional mask of the “unreliable narrator” Geniece in her semi-autobiograpical
Virgin Soul, the political and the
personal come even closer in De Facto
Feminism, as Juanita casts a retro-spective glance from which to build a
present and future, without debilitating nostalgia.

Because Juanita published Virgin Soul (2013), in her late 60s, what people used to call one’s
retirement years (when one could get away doing that), some may “see” her as a
“late bloomer.” Yet, what Juanita was doing these years, was not merely honing
her craft, but also exploring different social dynamics in which art circulates
(as she explores the social interactions in the theatre world, the stand-up
comedy world, and even the poetry world), and also digesting (if not exactly
recoiling from) the extremely intense “baptism by fire” she experienced at age
20 in the Black Panthers as an agent of change. The years in between are hardly
“lost years.” Juanita is able to make art out of stint as a maid in “Cleaning
Other People’s Houses,” in addition to increasing her empathy for the working
class women she champions. In a sense, the essay on Carolyn Rogers may be the most
personal, as obviously Juanita can relate to a woman celebrated by the BAM, but
later forgotten as she eschewed the “militant” posture which made it easier to
get published during this time.

In these essays, Juanita emerges as a working class
artist/intellectual (which our dominant culture tries to tell us is an
oxymoron), and a working class teacher, one who is highly skeptical of the
ready-made solutions, and the ridiculous gerrymandered specialized genres. She
challenges the social nexus that too often determines the circulation of
literary texts in our society, and yet emerges triumphant. As she speaks of the
way she learned to become a novelist, by jumping from many social scenes and
roles as artist/intellectual, I see a writer relentlessly measuring the inner
world by the outer world, and vice versa.

Although she doesn’t mention much about her role as teacher
in this book, many of the essays can be useful in a creative writing class, in
the sense that they show the many different social roles a novelist may play in
order to enhance one’s long-term commitment to her art. If people say your
story telling it not funny enough, why not show up at stand-up comedy night,
and try that out….with no illusions you’ll become a famous stand-up comic, but
it can help your writing. And seek
out writers groups! When she writes about some golden lessons she learned about
herself and writing (in A Playwright-In-Progress), one insight is “I learn
through making big, fat mistakes vs. reading/perfecting it in my mind.”(73) I,
for one, can relate to that, and I know many others who can: yes, sometimes we
publish precisely in order to make a mistake public, as if that is the only way
to move beyond it. Part of why Juanita’s such a great teacher is because she
can relate to the student going through that, or the student who doesn’t know
which genre they should put their primary emphasis: poetry, fiction, or
plays…for in this specialized society, you must choose one, and for one like
Juanita, that is not always an easy choice…(as if she, like Frank O’Hara, is
more interested in that “grace to live as variously as possible”), but it
precisely the life-long battle with that choice that makes Virgin Soul such a great novel, as this novel is conversant with so
many other genres (drama, and poetry, and stand-up comedy, with Black Panther Newspaper agit-prop, as
well as with the oft unheralded art of cleaning other people’s houses). This,
in fact, is why Virgin Soul, through
its art, has been able to help create community years after many other Panthers
were jailed for the same thing. One doesn’t have to have read Virgin Soul to appreciate De Facto Feminism, but they certainly
complement each other.

In another writer’s hand, such reflections may seem
self-indulgent, but Juanita never loses sight of the light she’s shining for
those unspoken for which her younger self may have been tempted to judge. She
never loses sight of the collective struggle, and of the fact that some things
must be kept secret, in offering brilliant advice for organizers: “Caucus as an
intransitive verb meant your group agenda had to be strengthened privately and
exhaustively to have maximum ”impact.” (111) Indeed, this is a book a 20, or
30, or even 50 year old, could not have written….

[1] Her essay is thus a perfect antidote to many academic
essays about the Black Arts Movement (in which white writers often debate on
“what happened to Le Roi?” “oh he hates us now”)

[2] I can’t resist noting that the new media 50 years
later seems to designed to prevent exactly the things the old media amplified.

[3] Notice her use of artful puns. BAM is not just a
Batman-and-Robinism, but the Black Arts Movement! (thus, POW could be Prisoner
of War?)

About Me

7 books of poetry, including Stealer's
Wheel (Hard Press, 1999) and Light As A Fetter (The Argotist UK, 2007). My critical study (with David Rosenthal) of Shakespeare's 12th Night (IDG books)
was published in 2001; more recent prose writings of contemporary media studies
and ethnomusicology have appeared on-line @ Radio Survivor
(http://radiosurvivor.com/2011/06/02/a-history-of-radio-and-content-part-ii-jukeboxes-to-top-40/)
and The Newark Review
(http://web.njit.edu/~newrev/3.0/stroffolino1.html). A recipient of grants from
NYFA & The Fund For Poetry, Stroffolino was Distinguished Poet-in-Residence
at Saint Mary's College from 2001-06, and has since taught at SFAI and Laney
College. As a session musician, Stroffolino worked with Silver Jews, King Khan
& Gris Gris and many others. Always interested in the intersections between
poetry and music, he organized a tribute to Anne Sexton's rock band for The
Poetry Society of America, and joined Greg Ashley to perform the entire Death
Of A Ladies' Man album for Sylvie Simmons' Leonard Cohen biography in 2012.
In 2009, he released, Single-Sided Doubles, an album featuring poems set to
music. In 2016, Boog City published a play:AnTi-GeNtRiFiCaTiOn WaR dRuM rAdIo. Stroffolino currently teaches creative writing and critical thinking at Laney College